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Show video formats at the top of the watch page. Tag every video link so that they can be downloaded easily.

The video links on the page are scanned in batches to avoid overloading the network. This works out nicely because YouTube has a request flood detector.

YouTube Features

On DASH videos (Adaptive Video Streaming)

YouTube now uses adaptive video streaming for 480p and 1080p videos (Oct 2013). What this means is that the video and audio streams are now separate.

They are indicated as M4V and M4A. They have to be downloaded separately and mux'ed before playing. If using ffmpeg:

ffmpeg -i vid.m4v -i vid.m4a -vcodec copy -acodec copy vid.mp4

The filename is always videoplayback. Before saving, select and copy the page title first. Then right-click on the video link, save-as and paste the title. Set the extension to either m4v or m4a to distinguish between video and audio.

On VEVO videos

When a VEVO video is first accessed, the video links will not be shown because the de-obfuscated code is gotten too late. You need to manually refresh to see the links. This should happen just once — until YouTube changes the de-obfuscated code again.

If the video links are still not shown, it could be because the new de-obfuscated code is not recognized anymore. This happens once every few months; it is a cat-and-mouse game. Post in the forum so that I know about it. :-D

On 60fps videos

YouTube now supports 60fps (Oct 2014). The 720p/1080p DASH videos have itag 298/299 instead of 136/137. They can be downloaded as usual. However, I have added HFR (High Frame Rate) to make it more obvious.

On 256kbps MP4 audio

Note: this is no longer available since 2016.

256kbps MP4 audio can now be downloaded! The link is only added for the watch page because it requires an additional HTTP request.

Note that just because a file is encoded in 256kbps does not mean it is really 256kbps. Check its spectrogram.

ffmpeg -i video.mp4 -vn audio.wav
sox audio.wav -n spectrogram

A real 256kbps audio file is not cut-off at 16kHz (128kbps) or 18kHz (192kbps). Some 192kbps audio are upscaled too.

Settings

There are some high-level settings in the script. Search for var userConfig = {.

Origins

YouTube Links greatly resembles YouTube HD Suite in both looks and functionality. I had been using it for a long time and like how it worked. I especially like the video link tagging; I could tell at a glance if a video was HD or not. Nowadays, almost every video is at least 720p.

When the script broke after YouTube changed its page format on 3rd August 2011, I decided to learn how it works and write my own from scratch. The first version was uploaded to userscripts.org on 12th Aug 2011.